The surge of Web 2.0 promoted visitors’ experiences in online museums. Museum 2.0 and Participatory Museum indicated the prospect of online museum in future. Online museum should be a participant history learning platform for visitors. However, there are few efforts had been done on how to fulfill educational mission of museums by building open learning platform for museum visitors according to the concept of Museum 2.0 or Participatory Museum. Under this situation, we addressed a framework of Social Online Museum Environments for learning in order to facilitate visitors’ participant learning aided by social media’s applications.

In this paper, firstly, we described the prospect of museum and introduced concepts of Museum 2.0 and Participatory Museum; secondly, based on participant tendency of online museums, we addressed to build SOMEs (Social Online Museum Environments) for promoting museum visitors’ learning online, whilst, stated the essential factors of this SOMEs; finally, we illustrated SOMEs via a layer architecture, which consists of study materials layer, device layer and entry point layer.